Sue Koffman Dubman:
CLASS OF 1966
Clayton High SchoolClass of 1966
Clayton, MO
Brown University - Graduate SchoolClass of 1977
Providence, RI
Sue's Story
I was born on Miami Beach (not really on the Beach, but in Miami Beach Hospital). I lived in the Miami Area until December 1964 when my family decided to move back to St. Louis. (My family was originally from St. Louis.) I was very upset about leaving Florida; after all, where would I go surfing? How could I leave my then boyfriend? (Good thing I did in retrospect.) The only redeeming factors were that I would get to see snow for the first time (which turned out to be brown ice) and I would be near most of my extended family. However, that did not keep me from crying all the way to St. Louis.
Much of my time at Clayton High was very rough. I was not used to going to a school where you actually had to read the books, not the Cliff Notes. I also did not have any friends at first. Most of the kids at Clayton had grown up together so it was hard to make friends. Fortunately there were some distant cousins (Tina Zorensky among them) and a few students that had recently moved to Clayton and they became my friends, along with a few others that were open to associating with an 'ouutsider'. On top of all that, my mother had terminal cancer. I was pretty miserable. I skipped school a lot (even though I never got caught) and my grades suffered. In my senior year, my Clayton guidance counselor told me I should consider secretarial school. And, that is when things changed for me. I was so angry with that counselor that I ended up working very hard just to prove her wrong. It took me a while though and I had a few setbacks along the way including the death of my mother.
From an educational perspective, I started out at Southwest Missouri State in Springfield as it was the only school that would take me since I applied in August. I was one of 2 Jewish females on Campus. The other, coincidentally, was my roommate. The next year I went to the big school, U of Missouri, Columbia then St. Louis. I did my graduate/PhD work at Brown University, Providence, RI in population studies with an emphasis on applied math (now called computer science). I have had a number of jobs since then e...Expand for more
nding up in bioinformatics for cancer research. My current employer is University of California-San Francisco (UCSF), a school that gets more federal funding for medical research than any other school including Harvard and MIT. (Sorry but I had to put in that plug.) Past employers in health care include the National Cancer Institute (NCI), Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) and Sanofi/Genzyme. I am currently in Boston (near my grand-kids) but I spent most of my working life in San Francisco. Still, I do still think of St. Louis as my home.
In 2009, I was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease (PD). As a person in cancer research, I never even considered PD as a possibility. Everyone in my family died of Cancer; but there I was in 2009 getting a diagnosis of a chronic and progressive disease, a diagnosis that was devastating as much for me as my family. After a few years of denial, I knew I needed to do something and believed that my experience, as both a patient and as someone in bio-medical research, could be put to good use so that in the future patients and their families, wouldn't have to suffer like mine.
Recently, I had Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) at the University of Florida-Gainesville. It changed my life. I no longer have the tremors and dystonia associated. It is truly amazing.
Today, I am a mother, wife, grandmother, sister, aunt, cousin, bioinformatics specialist, patient and patient advocate. I am very proud of my family and love them very much. I am also very proud of the work that I have done in helping find new treatments and improving quality of life for patients with Cancer. I have been blessed to have worked with some of the top cancer researchers in the world (including a Nobel Prize winner, a woman just recently named by Time Magazine as one of the hundred most influential people in the world and a winner of the top 10 most influential women scientists in the EU in the last decade). We are making good progress but not fast enough for me. And, I can credit my success to the Clayton Guidance Counselor who gave me a good kick in the pants so many years ago.
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